As I write, my Twitter account floods with notifications: protesters marching for Black lives in New York City are trapped on the Manhattan Bridge by NYPD on both sides, live-tweeting for help. I think of my friend’s Facebook Live stream of demonstrations in Washington DC, which captured the pandemonium of police and the National Guard shooting rubber bullets and spraying tear gas at peaceful protesters. Through my cell phone screen, I was immersed in the disturbing sounds of screaming and gunfire and the distressing sight of thousands of demonstrators running for their lives.
Racism has characterized our nation since before its inception, permeating nearly every thread of the United States’ social fabric and manifesting in the housing market, access to affordable medical treatment, and K-12 education. Systemic racism has been exposed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in which Black Americans are dying at three times the rate of White Americans. Social media alone cannot confront the insidious ways in which racism pervades society; in fact, as companies that profit directly from White supremacy hide behind posting vague platitudes lamenting racism, social media activity threatens to conceal true attitudes and inaction under the impression of engagement.
At the same time, social media has played an instrumental role in exposing White supremacy, particularly the cruelty and corruption of the police departments so crucial to upholding a racist order. Across social media platforms, numerous documented instances of racial violence have come under national scrutiny — including the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, which was subsequently covered up by the Glynn County Police Department, and the killing of Breonna Taylor by heedless Louisville Police officers. Additionally, before emerging on national news channels, thousands viewed footage of George Floyd’s death on Facebook — hearing his cries of “I can’t breathe” as Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated him.
The circulation of these appalling stories on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter was key to sparking the nationwide protests for Black lives. Social media has also captured how police have responded to protesters with the same merciless violence they’re being criticized for, revealing their dedication to protecting White supremacy. In some of the more gruesome videos publicized on Twitter, a Houston police officer on a horse tramples a peaceful protester; a thirteen-year-old is shot in the face with a rubber bullet by police during a protest in Sacramento, and an NYPD vehicle drives into a crowd of protesters.
Documenting systematic police brutality is important in a nation where people retort to “Black Lives Matter” with “Blue Lives Matter” and continue to insist that abusive police officers are merely “a few bad apples” within law enforcement. Mainstream news sources uphold this oppressive status quo under the guise of “objectivity” and “political neutrality”: they tend to frame incidents of racist police brutality as isolated and unfortunate while casting antiracism protests as senseless and harmful to society. Such biased coverage legitimizes police violence and invalidates movements for racial justice on the American public’s television screens.
But thanks to social media, one no longer requires a cable news segment to command a national platform and thus shape narratives on racial justice. Circulating their own candid portrayals of police brutality to millions of followers, activists have gone toe-to-toe with mainstream journalism while offering an accessible, incisive perspective on the U.S. Police State to the American public.
Additionally, social media has revealed that racism in America extends beyond party lines. Millions of Americans outwardly profess solidarity with the struggles of Black communities, touting their support of the Democratic Party as evidence, while harboring deep-lying racist beliefs that surface perniciously. In late May, a video captured by Christian Cooper of Amy Cooper (no relation) racially profiling him went viral on Facebook and Twitter. The footage showed Amy, a donor to Democratic politicians, calling the cops on Christian and highlighting that he was African American after he simply requested that she keep her dog leashed in a Central Park birding area. It was a particularly damning exhibition of how deeply ingrained racism is in the United States, prompting widespread reflection on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s warnings regarding the duplicitous tendencies of white liberals in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written in the heat of demonstrations for racial justice in Alabama fifty-seven years ago.
After they commenced, the contemporary protests for Black lives were galvanized by the fatal shooting of Tony McDade, a Black transgender man, by the Tallahassee Police. The absence of media coverage regarding McDade’s death, much less coverage that respected his gender identity, brought attention to the multiple layers of oppression faced by Black trans individuals. Activists on social media filled in the gaps of mainstream media and publicized McDade’s story, and millions have since expressed solidarity by signing petitions for justice and preserving his memory.
Thus, social media has emerged as a democratic megaphone for grassroots activists, in contrast to the tendency of popular news networks to serve as conservative corporate mouthpieces. Additionally, while mainstream media pundits generally offer perspectives on protests as detached observers, social media provides a platform for those who have the most at stake in fighting for racial justice. Not even the most elaborate interviews in popular periodicals capture first-hand experiences of racism and police brutality to the extent that social media does.
Activists’ social media presence seems to be paying dividends. Individuals across platforms who previously distanced themselves from political issues (a political stance in and of itself) are now phoning city mayors to defund police departments, donating to bail funds, and calling on others to do the same. This transformation of consciousness may mean many Americans are understanding the callousness of the U.S. Police State and grasping the significance of systemic racism.
However, as I peruse through Instagram stories, the valiant work of activists is interspersed between individuals posting receipts of their donations to bail funds or quotes of prominent Black activists stylized to match social media’s aesthetic tastes. On June 2, social media platforms experienced a “blackout” as users posted black squares in solidarity with the nationwide protests across Instagram and Twitter.
While people may participate in good faith, I cannot help but feel that these trends have degenerated into a mere performance designed to give the impression of racial awareness. Prescribed formulas — posting a black square, adding a hashtag, perhaps pinning an Angela Davis quote to your story, and insisting those who do not post are complicit — have made it particularly easy to appear engaged in issues of racial justice. My point here is not to condemn those who take such actions on social media but rather to challenge the idea that these actions equate to solidarity with racial justice movements. After all, we must be wary of social media’s tendency to distill and oversimplify: Instagram reduces our dynamic lives to a handful of heavily edited photos snapped during our happiest moments while Twitter limits our thoughts to 280 characters.
In this context, combating systemic racism appears to boil down to a couple taps of the thumb: Instagramming a black square or re-Tweeting a Malcolm X quote. #BlackoutTuesday posts and the words of Black emancipatory voices become commodified and tarnished as they are publicized by overtly racist colleagues, sports franchises with racist mascots, and corporations with racially exploitative business practices. These entities claiming to take the side of progress reveal that it takes no genuine engagement with the complexities of racism in the U.S. to blindly weaponize Black liberation activism as a tool for social clout and belonging.
Social media thus presents a paradox: it is an effective platform for the propagation of grassroots information exposing police brutality and overt racism while also a venue conducive to distorting antiracism into a series of effortless trends that may conceal other racist practices. In fighting for racial justice in an age dominated by social media, how do we take advantage of its benefits while navigating its pitfalls? The answer lies in adopting understandings of racism and antiracist practice that are systemic and layered.
We must not view the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade by police; the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery; Amy Cooper’s racial abuse of Christian Cooper; or police blasting rubber bullets into crowds of D.C. protesters as isolated incidents. These are manifestations of a system of White supremacy that has characterized the United States since its inception. Moreover, our understandings of racism must account for capitalism and patriarchy, which have conspired in insidious ways to pile layers of structural oppression on Black Americans. Only then can we look past black squares and hold peers, politicians, communities, and corporations accountable for upholding racial equity in the United States, paving an avenue towards a just future.
Image Credit: Twitter/@KenidraRWoods_
Correction: An earlier version of this story said the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery was covered up by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but they were not requested by the local agency to investigate the murder until May 5.